Personal Digital Index: Frequently Asked Questions

• What does the user interface look like?
• Is the Personal Digital Index secure?

The Personal Digital Index can help you to:

• Search any web-sites you've browsed
• Search all your digital experiences for a certain word or concept
• Building your own filing system
• Alert you to changes in web-sites
• Consolidating email chains
• Enable Peer to Peer collaboration with your friends and colleagues

What does the interface look like?

The production version will be completely integrated into Outlook (for the expert user) with a Personal Portal view replacing “Outlook Today” for the casual user.

The interface is envisaged as a separate search pane (in the style of Outlook 2003) or the current trend of web portals.

The ‘control’ pane is down the left hand side allowing the information (web page, file etc.) to be displayed in the large area on the right hand side of the window.

The Personal Digital Index will either have the comprehensive “list view” with a snippet of the information being indexed or alternatively the more compact “tree view” which classifies items by type and allows each classification to be expanded by the user as required.

Is the Personal Digital Index secure?

At Korscient we believe that data security is paramount and the Personal Digital Index is compatible with state of the art security technologies.

If individuals decide to use the collaboration functions, it follows that any documents they place on their public index will be accessible by others and will no longer be secure.

Search Web-sites

“I visited a site that had some interesting stuff about remembering all my digital experiences but I can’t remember where I saw it.”

A simple search on our Personal Digital Index will find the site for you whether or not you saved it as a bookmark.

Note that the Personal Digital Index is not a generic search engine. It will only index web site pages you've looked at and selected for inclusion into your Personal Digital Index. You can choose to have everything that you look at automatically added to your index or you can add only the things you think are important.

The beauty of the Personal Digital Index is that it grows with you. The more you do the more useful it becomes.

Search all your digital experiences for a certain word or concept

“I want a list of any web sites, emails, presentations, spreadsheets or documents I have browsed, received or drafted that contain the words: knowledge management”

A simple search on our Personal Digital Index will list all the websites you’ve visited, emails you’ve received or sent and documents you’ve opened which relate to "knowledge management".

Assist you with building your own filing system

The Personal Digital Index will assist you with categorising incoming data. This means that you will no longer need to remember where you have filed your information.

Alert you to changes in web-sites you have visited

It can (intelligently) inform you as to whether a particular web page or document you’ve marked has been changed since you last looked at it.

Consolidating email chains

It can consolidate email chains so you don’t have to keep every email and it’s reply, thereby saving you disk space.

Enable Peer to Peer collaboration between users

The Personal Digital Index allows you to divide your information for personal use (for just you to use) and shareable use (for you to share with others). The latter allows your friends and colleagues to access each other’s public index.

The public index will itself have security points so that you can decide who will have access to what parts of your ‘public’ index.

All searches are conducted through the same search interface so that this sharing appears transparent to you and your colleagues.